Electronic systems and circuits have made a significant contribution towards the advancement of modern society and are utilized in a number of applications to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as digital computers, calculators, audio devices, video equipment, and telephone systems have facilitated increased productivity and reduced costs in analyzing and communicating data in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. The manner in which the electronic devices perform operations can have a significant impact on the performance and end results. However, traditional attempts at accurately analyzing different aspects of device fabrication and operation are often limited and can be very complex and complicated.
As process dimensions shrink, impacts to critical paths are becoming progressively dominated by metal capacitance and resistance dominant delays. Significant resources are often spent on extraction tools, signal integrity analysis, and metal margining. A dearth of longitudinal cross production process data can lead to overly pessimistic margins that unnecessarily eat up silicon area. Metal sheet resistance tracking is regularly attempted by device foundries, but that is usually only one part of the equation and often over simplifies a 3D problem into a 1D measurement. Metal dominated ring oscillators (RO) have also been used to attempt to gain insight, but usually come up short as even metal dominated ring oscillators are sensitive to both metal resistance and capacitance, which vary in tandem.